It's an interesting and thoughtful post, as usual from this source. Less usual is that it is constructed in the form of a dialogue for large parts of the argument.
Bob: I really do sympathize with you here, of course. It’s hard not to. But I also look back at history and am deeply troubled by what I see. In the 1920s, nearly all the educated, intelligent, evidence-based, pro-science, future-oriented people agreed: the USSR was amazing. Shaw, Wells, Webb. They all thought Stalin was great and we needed a global communist revolution so we could be more like him. If you and I had been alive back then, we’d be having this same conversation, but it would end with both of us agreeing to donate everything we had to the Bolsheviks.
Alice: Okay, so the smart people were wrong once. That doesn’t mean…
Bob: And eugenics.
Alice: Actually…
Bob: ಠ_ಠ
Alice: Fine then. For the sake of argument, the smart people were wrong twice. That still doesn’t…
1 comment:
With 881 comments and counting, there's not much I could add that would be useful, even were I uninterruptedly brilliant on the topic. It's a great essay. He does frustrate me because he still doesn't get some aspects of what rank-and-file conservatives are like, but I quibble. He is a liberal who can self-observe and can challenge his own assumptions, God bless him.
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